Why a flack jacket may be the thing to wear

By Robert Fisk, The Independent,29 December 1996

After 20 years of living and working in Beirut, I did something just
before Christmas that I have never done before: I called London and
told the foreign editor that we needed a flak jacket for Beirut in
1997. I guess that says it all.

I haven't met anyone in the Middle East who doesn't believe that next
year is going to see the collapse of every recent hope of peace. How
can it be otherwise, they ask, when the Likud government in Israel is
tearing up the Oslo accords? Even President Bill Clinton, in his
familiar, cringing, gentle criticism of Israel, is beginning to
realize that war rather than peace may be the next fate of the region
next year.

Is it possible to avoid this terrible outcome? Yet another promise of
a Hebron withdrawal in a few daysthere have been eight such
promises in the past six monthsholds out a slim hope. But with his
new settlement programmes, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime
Minister, seems intent on provoking the Palestinians to violence. If
this is true, it's not difficult to see why. He doesn't like the Oslo
accord, and has refused the land-for-peace deal agreed by his
Labour predecessors; but still he says he only wants peace. So if, or
when, the Palestinians, deprived of all hope, resume an intifada
against Israel, Mr. Netanyahu will blame them for the collapse of the
peace process, claim that he only wanted peace, and declare
Oslo dead.

In a fair world, the United States would tell Israel to honor the
commitments to which Washington was a guarantor or lose its massive
financial subventions, its huge military assistance programme and its
constant, unquestioning political support from America. But, of
course, that is not going to happen. The American-Israel Public
Affairs Committee, the most powerful lobby group in the United States,
supports the Netanyahu government; Likud's friends in the US Congress
were defending his expansion of Jewish settlements on confiscated Arab
land within two days of Mr. Netanyahu's announcement.

James Baker, in the warning letter he wrote to the Israeli Prime
Minister this month, along with other former US Secretaries of State,
understood all too well what was going on: Israeli actions were going
to damage American interests in the region. But in a United States
where the President, Congress, press and television are so fearful of
criticizing Israel and where the country's small Jewish community
openly boasts of its immense political power Israel's interests are
likely to win over America's.

So what can we expect of 1997? Violence, on a potentially terrifying
scale, in the West Bank or Gaza or both, according to many
Palestinians. This is going to be an awful year, the worst of my
life, a Palestinian acquaintance from Gaza told me. He should
know; back in 1982, he spent months under Israeli fire on the west
Beirut perimeter, watching his comrades and the family with which he
was living die around him. But yet, he said, 1997 would be worse.

The Lebanese feel the same way. If the middle classes who are
resurrecting the shattered city of Beirut still cling to their dream
of prosperity, the villagers of southern Lebanon have no such
illusions. The ceasefire, which has been crumbling away almost daily
as the pro-Iranian Hizbollah eat away at the morale and lives of
Israel's occupation troops, is unlikely to last many more months.
Israel is wounding Lebanese civilians in its retaliatory artillery
fire -- something it was strictly forbidden from doing under the terms
of last April's truce. And, already, Israel has been preparing the
ground for an offensive by encouraging journalists to write about new
terrorist camps in the Bekaa valley containing Saudis, IRA men,
Iranians, Basque ETA guerrillas, just as they did before their
disastrous 1982 invasion of Lebanon. And if Israel believes that
Syria can be driven to the negotiating table without the return of the
Golan Heights an impossibility then Syrian targets in Lebanon
can be included in a future offensive.

And if this comes to pass, what will be the results? Many Arabs will
die. And Israelis who believed Mr. Netanyahu when he told them he
would bring them security will die too. Those brave Israelis who
consistently demanded a just settlement with the Arabs land for
peace will be in despair. American credibility in the Middle East
will also die a little death. Its soldiers in Saudi Arabia will be in
ever greater danger of attack; so will its embassies. Identified,
correctly, as Israel's principal armourer, the United States'
interests will become a more frequent target. Israel and its friends
in America will no doubt blame this on Islamic terror, on
Syria, Iran, Sudan or Libya. But the real reasons behind such violence
will be clear enough.

Europe stands to benefit from such a scenario. Increasingly aware that
America is in thrall to Israel and that the nations of the Middle East
are permanent neighbours, European governments are likely to become
more deeply involved in the region, whether America and Israel like it
or not and they will not. But the real losers, apart from the
Palestinians, will be those Arab regimes which, like Yasser Arafat,
decided to trust America's sponsorship of the peace process:
the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Morocco,Qatar and other Gulf states will
find themselves facing ever greater internal dissent and opposition.
This is the worst nightmare of the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak,
which is why he has been talking publicly of the dangers of political
collapse in the Middle East.

The traditional bad guys Sudan, Libya and Iran (which will
acquire a more radical president next year in the Iranian parliament
speaker, Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri) will gloat over the West's
embarrassment while scarcely raising a finger to help in the
denouement. If things turn out to be as bad as many fear, they will be
the winners. And, mesmerised by the crisis in the Middle East, we are
likely to forget Algeria, whose civil war is certain to grow yet more
bloody.

Is it possible, then, to feel any optimism? If an Israeli government
of national unity was formed to include Shimon Peres? If Mr. Arafat
somehow persuaded Mr. Netanyahu to halt settlement-building or if
Likud's promise were merely rhetoric? But alas, they are not, and Mr.
Arafat has no leverage over Mr. Netanyahu. Only the United States can
bring order back into the region, and it is just conceivable that the
antics of the Likud government will begin a slow process of change in
the United States, in which Israel will no longer be exempt from
criticism or even condemnation, in which America's uncritical support
can no longer be taken for granted.

But don't count on it. There is one phrase invariably used by US
administration spokesmen when they choose to duck their
responsibilities and let the Arabs and Israelis fight it out. They
always call upon all sides to exercise restraint. When I hear
that, I'll reach for my flak jacket.

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